By The Grin Labs

Ignorance is bliss.

When it comes to Global eCommerce, we are all, to a certain degree, working in the dark, stumbling a bit. We could be doing so much better.

Solution providers are shouting at the top of the rooftops that by taking a few steps with payments, logistics, and translations, retailers can compete in local markets. Unfortunately, that’s not the complete picture. It’s not the vendor’s fault– they keep solving the problems retailers think they have. The real problem is that we aren’t focusing our efforts on solving the problems consumers know they have.

The one constant about global eCommerce is that local consumer expectations and their unique customer journey are both in constant flux. If you don’t find a way to move toward that intimate cultural understanding of the consumer, you won’t keep up with their Amazon-ish expectations. You will fall of the cliff of relevance, your customer acquisition will drop, and your conversion will be painfully off the mark. In essence, your global strategy will fail.

Don’t panic! There’s good news, too. There is a next generation of retailers and expert vendors that get it. They understand how to work collaboratively to develop a meaningful process around localization.

The Global eCommerce Leaders Forum brings these like-minded experts together on February 9th in New York. It is here that retailers will get straight talk from experts that live and breath localization.

SP eCommerce is one of the expert companies that will present on localization in Asia. SP will bring to the table real-world examples of how the brands they work with get a 5-15% initial lift from localizing the entire customer journey spanning marketing, merchandising, payments, logistics, returns, and customer care. Their intense look at the local customer with local, “on the ground” teams provides for an especially useful insight for retailers entering into the Asian markets.

Chris Attewell, the SVP of the Americas for Search Laboratory, weighed in about translation and local campaigns in a converstion with the GRIN. “Imagine if you searched for a product on Google France and 10 paid ads showed up in French. Then, when you clicked on one of the ads, you landed on an English website. You’d pretty quickly go back to the search results and find an ad that landed on a French language page. Language is the best way to describe the problem but the real issue is localization. That’s the key. Localization goes far beyond just language. In the PPC world, you can be priced out of the market if your conversion rate is suffering from a failure to localize. We see it all the time. Customer acquisition breaks when retailers don’t understand the local culture.”

If you haven’t taken the global journey or are several years into the process of going global, developing an open collaborative model with other retailers and experts who understand your markets is key to your future success.